Paid Social Ad Examples: Effective Social Ads in 2026

Paid social media advertising is a ubiquitous ecommerce marketing strategy, but how do brands find inspiration? For some founders, it comes from successful examples of what other brands have done.

In an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Claudia Snoh, cofounder of craft coffee brand Kloo, discusses how she found inspiration for her brand’s approach to social media. 

“I learned this by studying other brands, notably Liquid Death,” she says. “Because if you go to their Instagram page, most of the time, they actually don’t talk about the products that they sell. They’ll just have a lot of random content on heavy metal or tattoos. Too many brands right now focus their content on selling the product versus selling the brand.”

Claudia took inspiration from Liquid Death’s approach, focusing Kloo’s social media page on craft in all its forms, an approach she says has been highly successful.

In this article, you’ll see paid social ad examples of various ways brands use social media advertising to build brand engagement and grow their impact.

What are paid social ads?

Paid social media ads are sponsored posts that appear on channels like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They can take many different forms, including influencer partnerships that blend in with organic content and shoppable carousels, but they typically include the words “ad,” “sponsored,” or “paid partnership.”

Both organic and paid social media marketing can be effective in growing your audience, but a paid ad campaign allows you to target specific users. Paid social ads and organic ads can work effectively when used hand in hand. For example, if you add Meta Pixel to your Shopify store, you can use retargeting tools to show paid social media ads to users who have organically interacted with your store in the past.

“We ran a campaign on Meta ads as well to get that ad out there because it was such a huge organic success,” says BookBox cofounder Kate Blazeska about repurposing a successful organic collaboration with a microinfluencer as a paid social ad. “We kind of knew we could put a bit of funds back into it and then get success out of that as well that way.”

Paid social ad examples

• Facebook ad
• Instagram ad
• Reddit ad
• TikTok ad
• Pinterest ad
• Snapchat ad

Founders often use other brands as inspiration when designing their own paid social ads. On Shopify Masters, Salt & Stone Founder Nima Jalali discusses how he finds inspiration in Nike’s approach to marketing.

“Nike’s one of my biggest inspirations,” he says. “They cater to all kinds of different consumers. My friends who are designers love them. My friends who don’t care about design love them. They just execute flawlessly on digital, whether it’s an email or a marketing campaign and ad, whatever it is, they operate to excellence. So they’re one I look at a lot.”

The following examples offer similarly effective approaches to designing paid social ads that deliver:

Facebook ad

source: Unbound Merino via Facebook

This Facebook ad from wool clothing brand Unbound Merino is an example of how to iterate simple Meta ads to test what works.

The two ads are similar—both using the same tagline, “One Shirt. Endless Outfits,” and they draw the viewer’s attention to a clear call to action: “Shop now”—but the ad copy differs. By running virtually identical versions of the same ad, the brand can fine-tune their approach to reaching an audience.

On Shopify Masters, Unbound Merino Cofounder and CEO Dan Demsky discusses how he makes the most of Facebook and other Meta paid ads to scale up the company’s results. 

“We figured out this system where, by adding more and more ads and making more iterations of the winning ads and killing the loser ads, we can add a little bit of budget every week,” he says. “We add one-and-a-half percent every single week, and our ROAS [return on ad spend] never dipped below three.”

Instagram ad

source: Alex Mill via Instagram

This Instagram ad from Alex Mill is another example of Meta ads in action.

“Instagram has helped us really create a community,” says CEO Roxanne Stahl O’Hara on Shopify Masters. “So we’ve really invested a lot in what we can do on Instagram.”

Featuring an eye-catching quote from GQ, this ad is built around creative content that centers a playful flat-lay of the brand’s clothes that looks like a person walking in silhouette, with a bold red “Shop now” banner designed to capture attention. The carousel format allows the brand to show multiple products instead of the lone product displayed in single image ads.

Roxanne says that this type of channel-focused strategy can be a winning move for small-budget merchants looking to increase engagement. 

Reddit ad

source: Reddit case study

This Reddit ad from clothing brand Under 5’10 shows how they used a Shopify integration to make the most of Reddit’s dynamic product ads system. This system is one of the AI tools Reddit uses to insert a brand’s full catalog of products into sales ads. This means that any pricing update or product change in their catalogue is automatically inserted into a campaign’s ad copy. 

According to a Reddit case study, the result was a ROAS of seven—a rate that was 1.8 times higher than the brand’s standard conversion campaign. Success stories like this are great examples of how leveraging AI tools to update targeted ads in real time can help brands create ads that reflect their most up-to-date product catalog.

TikTok ad 

source: TikTok case study

This TikTok ad is an example of how a French beauty brand used paid social media ads to appeal to niche audiences. According to a TikTok case study, Mela’Aura’s strategy focused on posting content about skincare education, product demos, routines for darker skintones, beauty tips, and customers testimonials, as well as before and after transformations.

Their video ads are designed to feel like user-generated content, using formats native to the platform to create social posts that integrate seamlessly into users’ feeds. This approach has paid off. According to the case study, they generated more than 4,600 orders during Q1 2026, and more than €233,000 in TikTok Shop revenue.

Pinterest ad

source: Pinterest case study

In these Pinterest ads, ThirdLove created a “discovery moment” using the platform’s AI-enabled Pinterest Performance+ tool to introduce their new temperature-regulating bras. The campaign balanced finding new customers with retargeting efforts aimed at people who already loved the brand. These image ads are saturated with bright colors, and they have clear calls to action (CTAs) inviting the viewer to “Shop TempSync.”

The campaign was a success. According to a Pinterest case study, ThirdLove’s use of Pinterest’s targeting features beat the expected benchmarks for incremental ROAS by more than double.

Snapchat ad 

source: Snapchat case study,

Launched during the holiday season, this social advertisement from Quay used Snap’s dynamic product ads feature to test ads. The tool allows brands to retarget users with ads tailored to their actions taken on the brand’s site or app. It also finds prospective customers by serving them relevant products built directly from their product catalog.

This example shows Quay’s strategy with a playful front-facing creator-led image, mirroring the style of user generated content (UGC). The CTA includes a special prompt offering users “50% off sitewide.” These features were dynamically adjusted on each ad in the campaign, and each user was presented with the most relevant frames based on their history with the brand.

According to a Snapchat case study, the campaign generated a click-through rate that was nearly three times higher than a non-dynamic campaign, with a 40% higher ROAS.